


Iterations

by apiphile



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Antlers, Blood, Don't Ask, Gen, Wendigo, a box of legs, a warehouse of legs, all that jazz, and a little poetic language, just getting something out of my system before the new series starts i guess, less a fic more a collection of scenes, sorry that was an awful pun, when'd he come?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-11
Updated: 2014-02-11
Packaged: 2018-01-12 00:27:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,345
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1179735
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apiphile/pseuds/apiphile
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Just getting a little something out of my system before the new series starts. Everything's in limbo really.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Iterations

Behind his eyelids it is always the dark red of rotting blood.

Will can smell his own sweat. The whimpering of his voice is no longer echoed by the whines of a small army of fluffy, concerned canine friends. The overalls feel no different to ordinary clothes.

Arrogant shadows touch his mind with skeletal fingers. They leave imprints of winter branches, staining snow with their darkness; they leave the branching imprints of veins below skin, of the reflection in antlers, of fractals, of antlers, of riverbeds of blood.

Grey impressions of people pass by. Every so often a howling nothingness in a suit comes to talk to him in a kindly voice, and sears a shadow over his aching mind.

Behind his eyelids it is no more silent than inside a machine in motion. Will can hear his heart thunder in jags of instinctive fear that make no sense.

Gentle shadows steal up on him, and inside his own personal darkness a spindly figure steps out of the carcass of a feathered deer, taking the antlers with it (like veins, like branches, like riverbeds, fractal blood, like veins). Dark blue among the red, unnatural and unstoppable. He can hear it its stomach roar.

_Courageous boy. I think I’ll eat your heart._

Will licks his lips. Tastes his own sweat. His eyelashes branch like antlers. Shadows fall on his mind.

The word, he thinks, resting his face on cold bars (branches, antlers, veins, eyelashes, blood, fractal blood), is “Wendigo”. Perhaps it is a pass word. It is a key he has been given, but he cannot find the lock.

Will swims a freezing river. The water boils, and turns red. Under the ice he finds dead antlers, stained in rivulets of blood, which make riverbeds, veins. Branches. More antlers, stained with more blood. He retches, and brings up handfuls of human hair.

The word, he thinks, is “sacrifice.”

A void in a beautiful suit stands outside the bars (branches. Arteries) and Will knows if he could reach those delicate white hands, and put his face against them, they would be as cool as fallen snow. He would stain them, with blood and shadows.

The empty space talks to him. It asks what he can remember. When Will turns his head he sees antlers, the blue darkness of a sky in the last vestiges of twilight, and he is terrified.

* * *

The magicians has deft hands, and with them he makes people disappear.

The next stage of any trick is to bring them back: but the fool is behind bars, so Abigail cannot be found.

She begs for freedom and for display, but until the fool is freed she must remain this way: cold, silent, and forgotten.

"I'm sorry," he says, "you'll get your chance."

She lies like fresh snow, among cuts of meat, waiting.

* * *

Jack openes the door onto a scene from a nightmare. There are legs as far as the eye can see. Since they cut the power, they're all decaying, a sea of dismembered parts sinking into human slime, and the stench is hallucinogenic.

"Jesus," Jack says, and he ducks out to retch, and retch, and retch.

"It looks like a Goya painting," says Beverley, hand over her nose and mouth.

"We're going to need a bulldozer," says Zeller, swallowing his gorge. "This is going to take _forever_."

"There's such a thing as _too much_ evidence," complains Price.

Like the closing scene from the story of human madness, the avalanche of rotting legs slips, and they stumble away to avoid being buried in it.

* * *

Dr. Lecter reviews his case notes for a disturbed young woman who is convinced that the Chesapeake Ripper is in love with her. She has a history: every time an inventive serial killer makes the news, he is in love with her.

The arrogant delusions are amusing, but tedious. One must assume she feels powerless and underappreciated, and confabulates desperately in order to appease a neurotic and not entirely unfounded sense of worthlessness. She has no potential.

Dr. Lecter drinks his wine and allows himself a miniscule sigh. He is bored, and when he is bored, he knows, he becomes a danger to himself.

* * *

Behind Will’s eyelids there is the beginnings of a face. It is sharp, with full lips, dressed in a uniform shade of nocturnal blue. On its hands there are rivers of blood, branches in red, gore-born antlers, spreading and spreading. The shadows they cast shimmer and sway.

The void with the killer’s face comes to Will and asks how he is.

Will swallows bile and chokes on his words. He says, “Wendigo,” but it isn’t the key, as far as he can see. He says, “Sacrifice,” and the void says:

“Is that what you feel like, Will? As if you have been sacrificed?”

But that’s not what he means. He can feel the words slipping away from him, the roar of meltwater tinged with blood, stripping him of meaning.

“Abigail,” he mutters.

“You sacrificed Abigail Hobbs?” suggests the thing. Sometimes it is a suit wearing a mask. Sometimes it discards its livery and stands shorn of pretence, an unblinking night terror topped with regal antlers, but always pushing him gently, inevitably, toward the fires of hell. Word by word the creature destroys the floor on which he stands.

“No, I –“ he says, and loses his thread.

“Where is she, Will?”

The voice is gentle and insistent, like the drip of blood on carpet. Behind Will’s eyelids he sees only darkness and thinks, _if I’m cured then all this is just who I am. And what if I’m not? Who is lying to me now?_

He looks at his hands. They are speckled with blood. The voice has gone, but the steady pat of blood falling onto a soft surface continues. Will looks up to the ceiling, fully expecting for one horrified moment to see Abigail suspended upon antlers above him, like a puppet.

It is empty, and somehow this is worse.

He licks his lips, and tastes salt.

“Help,” says Will, under his breath. He touches his fingers to his upper lip, and they come away vivid red with fresh blood. “Help me.”

There is no one listening, but in the shadow of his cell he can see the branches of antlers, like a dead winter tree.

* * *

The morgue is full. Legs lie on every table, in every drawer, bagged and open, each currently labelled with a question mark.

“Do we think _all_ of these are the Chesapeake Ripper?” Beverley asks, staring in exhaustion at the endless array of limbs.

“You could just call him by his name,” says Zeller, picking a leg from the nearest pile. “We worked with him.”

“Maybe someone stole some from a hospital,” Price suggests, hopefully.

“We still have to ID them if that’s the case,” Beverley points out. 

“Don’t serial killers ever go on vacation?” Zeller complains. “Or concentrate on quality, instead on quantity? This wholesale crap is sloppy and unartistic.”

“Don’t bitch about it,” says Beverley, “at least it’s not a totem pole.”

“ _He_ confessed,” says Price, picking a leg from the endless variety of legs. “What are we gonna do about _this_ asshole?”

“Shove a foot up it?” suggests Zeller. “It’s not like we’re short.”

* * *

It has been years since Dr Lecter was moved to make biltong – jerky, they call it here – and ordinarily he would consider it a brutal and unsophisticated use of meat. But this will be a lean period, and waste is a sin; it also contributes to cases that should not be open just now.

Dr Lecter has been reading about new breakthroughs in forensic science: the internet is very helpful. And so he lays his strips on cornstarch plastic, and covers them in pepper. When he has finished it will have to burn. DNA fragments are the enemy of recycling. 

The dogs, he recalls, are in danger of succumbing to dissection, should Alana become lax in her strident guard.

* * *

Behind Will’s eyelids his eyes flutter, roll, and doze. In his cell, the water rises. 


End file.
